- Email: [email protected]
Fertility and pregnancy in the Fontan population
Journal of Cardiac Failure Vol. 21 No. 8 2015
Editor’s Page
It’s Not Just Nomenclature, It’s a Patient With Heart Failure PAUL J. HAUPTMAN, MD Saint Louis, Missouri
3,500e4,000 word manuscript. If it can be done in 1,500 words, all the better. At the same time, a cover letter is always a plus. Let us know why your paper is important and what you want us to consider as we initiate the review process. I suspect George Orwell would approve of all this. He advocated finding ways to simplify language. For example, he hated constructs such as ‘‘not un-’’ as in ‘‘the decision was not unreasonable.’’ In Orwell’s opinion, a writer had to commit. The decision was either reasonable or not. With that said, we must be careful here. As pointed out in the ‘‘Johnson’’ column in The Economist, ‘‘Good writing is no place for the tyrant. Never say ‘never’ and always avoid ‘always,’ or at the least handle them with care.’’ (www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/07/george-orwellwriting). So send in your manuscripts. Feel free to contact me by e-mail or through our managing editor if you have questions about whether your manuscript might be a ‘‘match’’ for the Journal. We are open to new ideas and novel research in all its forms, and aim to engage and excite investigators and non-investigators alike. We all share common interests in heart failure (the biology, the epidemiology, outcomes research, and more) and a common focus (the patient with heart failure). However, we will cede one point for those of you who work with nonhuman animal models. If you state something like ‘‘heart failure mice .,’’ you’ll get a pass.
Thanks to the efforts of an excellent cohort of associate editors, the Journal of Cardiac Failure continues to evolve with new sections, more editorials, timely reviews, tweeting (soon), and more. We are working hard to give the Journal a new type of accessibility and readability. At the same time, some quirks are to be expected and so I am pleased in this column to report on a few of them. Potential authors please take note that we like to see the phrase ‘‘patients with heart failure’’ not ‘‘heart failure patients.’’ The former avoids labeling and is our favored term. It is a subtle point, perhaps, but one that we will remind authors about on revision and/or final review of manuscripts to be published. It is our sense that the former (‘‘patients with heart failure’’) reflects more clearly that there is a patient and a patient’s life behind a difficult diagnosis; lead with the patient, not the disease. It is the same with almost any diagnosis you can think of and may really help us to reframe how we view patients. I am guilty as charged but am working hard to watch what I say and how I say it. So you will hopefully hear me say ‘‘the patient with diabetes’’ rather than ‘‘the diabetic patient.’’ We would also point out that papers need not begin by reviewing what we already know; that is, most readers of the Journal have seen the data pertaining to the basic epidemiology of heart failure a few thousand times. We should rid ourselves of an unspoken rule that papers must begin by paying homage to the ‘‘epidemic of heart failure’’ or the ‘‘five million patients with heart failure in the United States.’’ Feel free to save your word count a bit and instead focus on what you have studied and why. In fact, we like succinct. We are prepared to publish more Brief Reports. There is no special magic in a
Disclosures None.
From the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, Missouri. Reprint requests: Paul J. Hauptman, MD, Saint Louis University Hospital, 3635 Vista Avenue, Saint Louis, MO 63110, USA. Tel: þ1 314 268 5293; Fax: þ1 314 577 8861. E-mail: [email protected] 1071-9164/$ - see front matter Ó 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cardfail.2015.06.015
611
Editor’s Page
It’s Not Just Nomenclature, It’s a Patient With Heart Failure PAUL J. HAUPTMAN, MD Saint Louis, Missouri
3,500e4,000 word manuscript. If it can be done in 1,500 words, all the better. At the same time, a cover letter is always a plus. Let us know why your paper is important and what you want us to consider as we initiate the review process. I suspect George Orwell would approve of all this. He advocated finding ways to simplify language. For example, he hated constructs such as ‘‘not un-’’ as in ‘‘the decision was not unreasonable.’’ In Orwell’s opinion, a writer had to commit. The decision was either reasonable or not. With that said, we must be careful here. As pointed out in the ‘‘Johnson’’ column in The Economist, ‘‘Good writing is no place for the tyrant. Never say ‘never’ and always avoid ‘always,’ or at the least handle them with care.’’ (www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/07/george-orwellwriting). So send in your manuscripts. Feel free to contact me by e-mail or through our managing editor if you have questions about whether your manuscript might be a ‘‘match’’ for the Journal. We are open to new ideas and novel research in all its forms, and aim to engage and excite investigators and non-investigators alike. We all share common interests in heart failure (the biology, the epidemiology, outcomes research, and more) and a common focus (the patient with heart failure). However, we will cede one point for those of you who work with nonhuman animal models. If you state something like ‘‘heart failure mice .,’’ you’ll get a pass.
Thanks to the efforts of an excellent cohort of associate editors, the Journal of Cardiac Failure continues to evolve with new sections, more editorials, timely reviews, tweeting (soon), and more. We are working hard to give the Journal a new type of accessibility and readability. At the same time, some quirks are to be expected and so I am pleased in this column to report on a few of them. Potential authors please take note that we like to see the phrase ‘‘patients with heart failure’’ not ‘‘heart failure patients.’’ The former avoids labeling and is our favored term. It is a subtle point, perhaps, but one that we will remind authors about on revision and/or final review of manuscripts to be published. It is our sense that the former (‘‘patients with heart failure’’) reflects more clearly that there is a patient and a patient’s life behind a difficult diagnosis; lead with the patient, not the disease. It is the same with almost any diagnosis you can think of and may really help us to reframe how we view patients. I am guilty as charged but am working hard to watch what I say and how I say it. So you will hopefully hear me say ‘‘the patient with diabetes’’ rather than ‘‘the diabetic patient.’’ We would also point out that papers need not begin by reviewing what we already know; that is, most readers of the Journal have seen the data pertaining to the basic epidemiology of heart failure a few thousand times. We should rid ourselves of an unspoken rule that papers must begin by paying homage to the ‘‘epidemic of heart failure’’ or the ‘‘five million patients with heart failure in the United States.’’ Feel free to save your word count a bit and instead focus on what you have studied and why. In fact, we like succinct. We are prepared to publish more Brief Reports. There is no special magic in a
Disclosures None.
From the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, Missouri. Reprint requests: Paul J. Hauptman, MD, Saint Louis University Hospital, 3635 Vista Avenue, Saint Louis, MO 63110, USA. Tel: þ1 314 268 5293; Fax: þ1 314 577 8861. E-mail: [email protected] 1071-9164/$ - see front matter Ó 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cardfail.2015.06.015
611